UPCOMING EVENTS

Maybe it’s Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference next week, maybe it’s just the stars aligning, but salespeople have had a great last couple of weeks, with sales tools popping up and getting overhauls. Email tracking tool Yesware is the latest of these.

The company, which got its start as a tool for tracking whether or not customers and prospects have opened, clicked, browsed, and so on, is now taking a new step. Today, it’s announcing that it’s adding PowerPoint presentation tracking and a built-in phone call tool to its toolkit. It’s also officially releasing support for Microsoft Outlook, which was previously in beta.

“We started the company as an email solution and we always wanted to the get the other ways that salespeople work,” Yesware chief executive Matthew Bellows told VentureBeat in an interview.

Salespeople can now also call customers or prospect directly from their emails. Built with Twilio’s Voice API, the feature was quietly included in the initial mobile app release, but Yesware is now promoting it more heavily and has integrated it into the desktop version of its product as well.

When a salesperson places a call, a notes field pops up in which they can jot down notes. The notes are then added into the contact’s Salesforce file to help the salesperson stay organized with minimal effort.

Studies have shown that calling a prospect right after they’ve opened an email yields about a 30 percent rate of connecting with them, compared to the 1-3 percent overall industry rate, according to Bellows. So, not surprisingly, other companies such as Stitch are also helping salespeople place calls soon after an email has been opened.

And speaking of email (again), Yesware is finally making Outlook support officially available for everyone. Bellows told me that it’s been one of the most popular requests since the beginning of Yesware; and after a beta phase, it’s finally here. It will have the same pricing as the original Gmail version.

With the $13 billion sales acceleration market headed to reach $30 billion in the next three years, according to Bellows, Yesware is not the only company to turn to the all-in-one solution as its gameplan. InsideSales, best known for integrating voice calls with customer relationship management software, acquired email tracking company iHance in May to enhance its offering shortly after raising $100 million. ClearSlide, a company that made its name in presentation tools for salespeople, added email tracking and acquired Crunch to bolster that. It, too, raised $50 million this year.

But with the Dreamforce conference coming up, at which Salesforce will very likely announce its “Analytics Cloud,” data and analytics are really where Yesware — and these other companies — are now focusing. (Cue reference to hockey legend Wayne Gretzky’s famous quote about skating to where the puck will be, not where it is.)

As a Salesforce partner, Yesware’s tools will surely play nicely with whatever the enterprise giant announces next week, especially given the amount of data its tools feed into Salesforce. But it’s not hard to sense that Bellows and his team are already skating to the analytics puck, so to speak. He only vaguely said that they’ve been looking at data analytics and have hired a data scientist and data engineer. So even though he wouldn’t divulge any specific plans, analytics are sure to be part of Yesware’s next announcements.